Underground Airlines(93)

“You up?”

I shifted my weight, and the chains rattled.

The man who spoke, whoever he was, was on the far side of the room. Still making that soft noise, tap, tap, tap.

I turned my head, fought back a rolling spasm of pain, and saw him. He was inside my cage with me, leaning against the thick steel door with his arms crossed, bored. In one hand he held my envelope, Kevin’s envelope, five by seven, with a small bulge in the middle. He was holding it in his right hand and tapping it, tap, tap, tap, against his left bicep.

The man was familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place him. A wide neck, very pale skin. Dull eyes.

“Come on,” he said. “Get up.”

I knew where I’d seen him. The Fountain Diner, my first meal in Indianapolis. Cook’s partner, thick-necked and red-faced. Officer Morris, who wouldn’t know he was on fire unless a pretty girl told him so. I guess someone had told him something.

“Up,” he said again. “Time to go.”





Part Three





North





Compromise is not the worst of sins, but it is the busiest. The only one we’re all of us doing, twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week.

—Reverend Kevin Shortley,

On the Urgent Necessities, 1982



You are not alone

I am here with you

Though you’re far away

I am here to stay

—Michael Jackson, “You Are Not Alone,” 1994





1.



One more hotel room.

Motel, maybe. I don’t know. Morris drove for a while, some dull collection of dark hours, with me in the back of the unmarked silver sedan he had shoved me into by the top of my head, and then I saw neon that said VACANCY. I saw a squat one-story building, and then I was at a door with a number 4 on it. One more ugly hotel room, facing one more deserted parking lot, in one more invisible town.

Morris knocked on the door marked 4, and it was Willie Cook who answered—Cook with his shark’s smile, his dancing eyes. He was out of uniform, sleeves rolled up, chewing a piece of gum and holding up his hands as if to welcome an old friend.

“Well, all right,” he said. “You made it.”

“Oh, my God,” said Martha behind him. “Oh, my God…” Her voice reminded me what I must look like, battered and bandaged and chained. Cook, without turning, said, “Now, you stay where you are, baby.”

I watched Martha sit slowly back down on the edge of the bed. I formed my mouth into a smile. It’s fine, I thought, just as loudly as I could. Not as bad as it looks. Morris had taken me out of the leg shackles, at least. At least I had my pants back on.

I let Morris push me into the room, and I stood where he placed me: in front of the rickety little motel table between the kitchen area and the bed area. Cook settled into the table’s one wooden chair and put his feet up, like a working man relaxing at the end of his hard day. There was a gun on the table, too—not his service weapon; some snub-nosed thing—and a laptop showing a screen saver of the Indy 500, colorful race cars moving in patterns on the sleeping monitor.

Morris tossed Cook the envelope, and he caught it, held it a second, then set it down on the table. His big gold class ring made a hollow knock on the cheap wood.

“Well, all right,” he said again. “Nicely done.”

Morris fetched himself a beer before settling with a sigh into an overstuffed chair beside the window. He had the bottle in one hand and his service weapon in the other, pointed at Martha.

She looked bad. She looked half out of her mind with weariness and confusion. There were, at least, no bruises on her face, no blood at the corners of her lips. Her eyes were dark and panicky, roving back and forth between Morris and Cook, Cook and me.

God, that girl should have run. She should have run from me in Indianapolis; in Green Hollow, Alabama; at Garments of the Greater South; she should have run. She should have run from me a million different times.

“I don’t understand this,” I said to Cook. “What is happening? What is she doing here?”

He blew a bubble, destroyed it with his teeth. “Did you forget?”

“What?”

“Your leash, son. Father Barton’s laptop, tapping into your tracker, keeping tabs.” It was the same laptop on the table in front of him, next to the gun.

“I didn’t forget,” I said. “But it was my understanding that when I had the lost package in hand, I would return directly to Indianapolis and give it to Father Barton.”

“Yep. That was indeed the plan.”

Questions were struggling to the surface of my mind, one by one, then all together, like animals emerging from mud. Had they known the whole time that I was planning to double-cross them, to turn this goddamn envelope over to the marshals? Was it just Officer Cook who had been on to me, or was it Barton also? And what about Morris, who, Cook had told me, knew nothing about his Airlines service—what was he doing running these kinds of errands, not to mention how? How had Morris come by the authority to get a man sprung from the bowels of a megaplantation?

The only question I said aloud, though, was my first one again. “What is she doing here?”

“She’s insurance,” said Cook. “To make sure we get what we need.” He pivoted in his chair, pointed at Martha. “Tell him, honey.”